Lost Tracking

These images are a contemporary version of the kind of traditional dioramas found in natural history museums; they are digital dioramas. I 3D scanned taxidermied baboons, and in a 3D software, I mapped photographs of their natural habitats but in different axis. The images show the glitches of the 3D scanner while tracking the animals. This project is an intent at tracing the origins of 3D technologies. Dioramas were the first form of virtual reality. According to Donna Haraway dioramas tell as much about the society that created them as they do about the worlds they represent, referring to Carl Akeley’s work for the American Museum of Natural History:

“His picturesque animal family tableaux and hierarchies reflect the conceptions of race, gender, and class during Roosevelt’s presidency. Dioramas were the response to the irruption of socialism, feminism and an increase in the immigrant population that threatened the domain of the Caucasian North American majority”

Nowadays, virtual reality and CGI (Computer-generated-imagery) could be used in the same way. 3D imagery could confer us a skeptical freedom that makes us disbelieve everything that surrounds us or could perpetuate the control of society.